A reader and I were exchanging emails over the inability of his Epson 740 (a supported printer) to print from OS X on his iMac. He spent quite a bit of time debugging the issue, but was making no progress. He could print fine in OS 9.04 and even Classic, but not in OS X. Every time he tried, the job ended with a "-9671 Error". Others on the web with identical machines and printers were not having the same problem.

After spending many hours on the issue, he finally tracked it down. When he originally bought his printer, the sales rep had also sold him an Epson Parallel to USB converter cable. This appears to have been (see the comments!) what was causing the OS X printing problems. As soon as he replaced it with a straight USB cable, everything worked fine.

So if your Epson won't print, check your cable -- and maybe just plug and unplug it, per the comments below. If that fails, it may be time to try a new cable.

Although you can't command+C copy from the "Address" line in IE 5.1 (we all hope it's a bug, not a feature!), you can drag the little '@' symbol to a text window and the url will paste where you drop it at. This also works in text fields on pages, which also don't like to be copied in IE 5.1 - just highlight and drag the text where you want it to go.

Some will say that the best workaround for this bug is OmniWeb 4.0 ;-).

This goes in the "Hmm, that's interesting" category ... or the "Check the prefs, bozo!" column, based on the comment below ;-).

I was taking a look at Apple's "Mac OS X: An Introduction for Support Providers" (a very good overview of OS X, by the way), and I was trying to browse the file with the scroll wheel on my Intellimouse. It seemed I could scroll down, but then it would get stuck. I could scroll up again, but not down. Similarly, at the top of the page, I couldn't scroll up any longer, but I could scroll down.

It took me a couple tries to figure it out. In the Preview app, the scroll wheel only scrolls on the current page. To move to the next or previous pages, you have to hit the next/prev arrows at the bottom of the screen.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature! I like the way you aren't suddenly jolted to a new screen if you scroll off the bottom, but it's a pain having to hit the arrow button for each page.

You can run more than one instance of the same Cocoa app, for example two Clock apps running under the different process id, from the command line. It is pretty simple to do:

Launch Terminal.app

Using Finder, navigate to the app you want to run

Control-click, then select the 'Show Package Contents' item

Open ./Contents/MacOS folder. There is usually only one executable file.

Drag and drop the file on the terminal window. This prints a path to the file.

Put '&' at the end of the path and type return

Repeat 5 and 6

Now, you have two processes of the app.

Caveat: GUI apps are not intended to be executed by this way. If more than one instances are running, they access the same configuration files, e.g. a preferences file. So, there is a chance to corrupt these files. Do it at your own risk and just for entertainment.

The small icon in the Get Info window in OS X is useful as an application launcher, too. If you have an application selected in the Get Info window, a double-click on the icon will launch that app. A double-click on a document icon will launch that document's associated application. Finally, a double-click on a folder icon will open a Finder view of that folder.

I recently went through hell to get OS X installed on my Dual G4 450. Having read most of the public message boards (macfixit, macnn, apple, macaddict etc) looking for answers, I thought I would impart some of my hard won knowledge to the greater readership of macosxhints.

If you are getting kernel panics or installer error messages that say "could not write file to disk/archive" during your install, you may have problems with RAM or 3rd party devices.

For more great installation tips from Yuri, read the rest of the article!

There is a great utility for OS 9.1 from Clarkwood Software called Peek-a-Boo (PaB). This is the best utility I've seen for monitoring processes that run inside Classic. When xload or ProcessViewer shows that something has pegged the CPU, run PaB and it will tell you WHICH process within Classic is hung, and often/usually succeed in letting you kill the offending process using PaB.

You can read about and download PaB from Clarkwood Software's Peek-a-Boo page.

All Cocoa apps respond to familiar commandline controls. This is what I mean, go into a Cocoa application (Omniweb, TextEdit, anything that is not Carbon or Classic) and click on any text field.

Type some random stuff, then press CTRL-A, it will bring the cursor to the beginning of that line, which is a common control in UNIX command lines. [Note: CTRL = the control key]

Read the rest of the article if you'd like to learn a number of other keyboard shortcuts for text editing in Cocoa apps.

[Editor's note: This isn't really just for UNIX geeks. How many times have you wanted a quick way to navigate around a text box without using the mouse?! Learn a few of these shortcuts, and free yourself from the mouse!]